The US digital switchover threatens to become another one of those damp squib moments in US technology history, where a lot of hot air and rhetoric is wasted in the run up to an event which happens without a single murmur on the day. The other big one in our memory is the Millenium bug which said that most computer programs would crash, bringing down networks, and crashing planes and trains because all dates were recorded in just the last two digits. Hundreds of $millions were spent re-writing every program on the planet and nothing happened on January 1st 2000, leading to as many people saying ‘fake’ as there were saying ‘job well done.’
Despite the new US presidential administration making the TV switchover delay one of its most public targets, right up there with saving the country from financial ruin by pledging $100s billions to a fiscal rescue package, the 421 TV stations which went ahead and took the option to go ahead and switch, did so with hardly a hitch.
These stations agreed to make the change ahead of the new mandated date of June 12, just under a quarter of all the TV stations across the US market. The Obama administration had felt that millions of US home owners would be unable to receive new digital signals due to their reliance on a $40 coupon program which would pay for the cheaper digital to analog signal converters, which would work with their old analog TV sets. Nielsen panicked the nation with an estimate of an alarming 6 million homes being without TV, while the coupon program which had run out of money admitted to a waiting list of over 3 million.
It is great PR for a president which is hoped will be in touch with the poor in his country, but the truth is that a cynic could see this back to front ‘ the pay TV services have been using the uncertainty around this switchover to create a feeding frenzy of new sign ups which will keep the recession at bay ‘ DirecTV numbers out this week, as well as Netflix (not really a pay TV service, but a pay entertainment service) both show how new low priced subscriptions have countered any recessionary effects. So they would have been lobbying the new president to extend the current conditions of TV uncertainty.
The National Association of Broadcasters reported that there were no major hiccups and the popular US media trying to find ‘hard luck’ TV switch off stories, found they were thin on the ground. Of course the fact that a good bunch of TV stations chose to go optionally with the existing date is a good thing, since now anyone caught out will find that they have just lost a few channels rather than had their TV go completely dark, and they can go out during the next four months and fix the problem with or without a government coupon.